It's A Holiday
30/06/21 14:27
It's A Holiday, Not A Bloody Staycation
There have been so many bad words and terms coined over this last 18 months or so of this pandemic - and I can probably complain noisily about many of them. But the worst of them all is that foul stench of an idea called: ‘Staycation.’ For one slightly innocuous word it has so many slanted ideas crammed into it.
In a world full of The Entitled who feel the world owes them everything and the whole Pandemic is aimed at spoiling their day to day life it seems the word has been coined for them - the very idea of a staycation putting people out makes me want to scream. It is not a staycation. If you are going away for a few days in the UK you are on holiday. If you are sat at home watching Netflix and ordering food via Uber Eats then that may be termed a staycation - if you must - but if you are on a trip down to Cornwall, across to East Anglia, on a city break in London, or walking up hills in Snowdonia or the Western Highlands… It’s a fucking holiday. The fact you didn’t fly anywhere doesn’t make it anything less than that.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s my holidays, like so many of the people around me, were with my family in places as near flung as the Llyn Peninsula in North Wales, then down to such 'exotic' locations as Devon and Cornwall. We had epic trips to caravans and bungalows in Cricceith, Abersoch, and Morfa Nefyn and stays in guest houses in Ilfracombe and Torquay in Devon, and house stays near Padstow in Cornwall. All these holidays are indelibly marked in my head: and all of us who went on the trips. There was a week here, or two weeks there. The weather did what it chose to. The places we went while on these trips were variously brilliant, boring or average. There were nice meals, average meals, ice creams, ciders, sunburn and accidents. In short: they were holidays. We were away from home - we weren’t at school and we weren’t at work. They were holidays - plain and simple - not fucking staycations. Of course they weren’t.
So if you can all do one good thing for the rest of your life… if you are away from home on a break - and have not been abducted - just say you are on holiday. A holiday be it in Algarve, the Caribbean, on Route 66 (I know: it no longer exists), or in a tent on a wet peninsula in some lonely British extreme - or within ten miles of your house or beside the M62 - it is a fucking holiday.
Never utter that word again. You know which one.
There have been so many bad words and terms coined over this last 18 months or so of this pandemic - and I can probably complain noisily about many of them. But the worst of them all is that foul stench of an idea called: ‘Staycation.’ For one slightly innocuous word it has so many slanted ideas crammed into it.
In a world full of The Entitled who feel the world owes them everything and the whole Pandemic is aimed at spoiling their day to day life it seems the word has been coined for them - the very idea of a staycation putting people out makes me want to scream. It is not a staycation. If you are going away for a few days in the UK you are on holiday. If you are sat at home watching Netflix and ordering food via Uber Eats then that may be termed a staycation - if you must - but if you are on a trip down to Cornwall, across to East Anglia, on a city break in London, or walking up hills in Snowdonia or the Western Highlands… It’s a fucking holiday. The fact you didn’t fly anywhere doesn’t make it anything less than that.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s my holidays, like so many of the people around me, were with my family in places as near flung as the Llyn Peninsula in North Wales, then down to such 'exotic' locations as Devon and Cornwall. We had epic trips to caravans and bungalows in Cricceith, Abersoch, and Morfa Nefyn and stays in guest houses in Ilfracombe and Torquay in Devon, and house stays near Padstow in Cornwall. All these holidays are indelibly marked in my head: and all of us who went on the trips. There was a week here, or two weeks there. The weather did what it chose to. The places we went while on these trips were variously brilliant, boring or average. There were nice meals, average meals, ice creams, ciders, sunburn and accidents. In short: they were holidays. We were away from home - we weren’t at school and we weren’t at work. They were holidays - plain and simple - not fucking staycations. Of course they weren’t.
So if you can all do one good thing for the rest of your life… if you are away from home on a break - and have not been abducted - just say you are on holiday. A holiday be it in Algarve, the Caribbean, on Route 66 (I know: it no longer exists), or in a tent on a wet peninsula in some lonely British extreme - or within ten miles of your house or beside the M62 - it is a fucking holiday.
Never utter that word again. You know which one.
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